New Meryl Streep biography shows how she glamorously reinvented herself in high school
A new biography about Meryl Streep, titled Her Again, has arrived.
Written by Michael Schulman -- who did 80 interviews with people who knew Streep -- the book sheds light on the Oscar-winning actress' life.
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The book trails her rise as an actress, beginning with her first big acting challenge -- becoming popular in high school.
Streep wasn't always top-clique material. "She was kind of a bossy little bully sort of girl," Schulman tells NPR.
"She had scraggly short hair, cat-eye glasses that made her look like a middle-aged secretary."
"She had scraggly short hair, cat-eye glasses that made her look like a middle-aged secretary. She was completely unconcerned with how she looked and being liked."
But all that changed over the course of two years, according to Schulman. Streep went blonde, swapped glasses for contacts and joined new clubs.
"She joined the cheerleading squad, she was the lead in every musical, she would do the French Club and Student Council," Schulman says. "And eventually her senior year she was elected homecoming queen, which was kind of the pinnacle. It was kind of like winning best actress of her high school."
Streep went on to overachieve at Yale, getting so many lead roles that her classmates reportedly resented her. Schulman says that in a way, the future Oscar winner was "trapped" by her own talent.
"Perfection is a kind of prison," he says. "This is part of her M.O.: Every ecosystem she enters she rises to the top because of her skill and when she gets to the top she kind of looks around and thinks 'Oh, no, me? Why?'"
What does Streep think of this assessment? We might never know; the actress declined to be interviewed for the book. After Schulman reached out to her, she responded via her publicist.
"Leave me to the thing I love. I love acting," Streep said, according to Schulman. "But being called 'the greatest living actress' — a designation not even my mother would sanction — is the opposite of good or valuable or useful. It is a curse for a working actor."
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Yohana Desta was the senior film reporter for Mashable. She is a Northern Virginia native and an American University grad. She enjoys carefully curating her Instagram account and can often be found reading books, going to concerts, watching movies and learning way too much about pop culture.
